How Many Freemasons Are There? The Consensus Voting Mechanism in Metric Spaces

Abstract

We study the evolution of a social group when admission to the group is determined via consensus or unanimity voting. In each time period, two candidates apply for membership and a candidate is selected if and only if all the current group members agree. We apply the spatial theory of voting where group members and candidates are located in a metric space and each member votes for its closest (most similar) candidate. Our interest focuses on the expected cardinality of the group after $T$ time periods. To evaluate this we study the geometry inherent in dynamic consensus voting over a metric space. This allows us to develop a set of techniques for lower bounding and upper bounding the expected cardinality of a group. We specialize these methods for two-dimensional metric spaces. For the unit ball the expected cardinality of the group after $T$ time periods is $\Theta(T^{1/8})$. In sharp contrast, for the unit square the expected cardinality is at least $\Omega(\ln T)$ but at most $O(\ln T \cdot \ln\ln T )$.